


The Serpent Suttlest Beast of All the Field

by thundercrackfic



Series: Not What We Have But What We Enjoy [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Also Paradise Lost canon compliant (mostly), But what else would you expect, Canon Compliant, Crowley's Name is Crawly | Crawley (Good Omens), Gen, He/Him Pronouns For Crowley (Good Omens), Hell is Terrible (Good Omens), How Crawly Got His Corporation, Pre-Canon, Snake Crowley (Good Omens), They/Them Pronouns for Crowley (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:34:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28100997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thundercrackfic/pseuds/thundercrackfic
Summary: Satan and Hastur try to enter Eden, but are discovered. A nameless and bodiless Fallen angel seeks only to survive. They find a ride to take them into the Garden.
Relationships: Beelzebub & Crowley (Good Omens), Crowley & Hastur (Good Omens)
Series: Not What We Have But What We Enjoy [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1720336
Comments: 8
Kudos: 18





	1. Chapter 1

The Fallen angel’s hiding place vibrated with Satan’s angry roar. They braced themself against the hot rock, holding as still as possible, in the hopes that they’d be overlooked.

Hell wasn’t a place where hope worked.

“OUT!” growled Duke Hastur. He couldn’t shake the rock as Satan could, but he was a lot closer. “The Dark Lord’s called an assembly. You can’t hide. He’ll find you, and He’ll eat you. And if He doesn’t, I will. OUT!!”

They slithered out of their hiding place.

* * *

Other nameless demons spread the gossip, and they soon learned what had happened. Satan had gone to God’s new world – Earth – and tried to bring down Their new creation. But Satan had been spotted and banished back to Hell. It hadn’t even been an archangel who’d banished Satan; just some of Gabriel’s legion. Satan was furious.

“God has created a planet full of worthless, lesser beings,” Satan hissed. “Replaced you angels with golems made of dirt and ice. It is not to be borne. He cannot take them to Heaven. They will swell My ranks instead. You, My angels, will make it so. I cannot return to Earth; My power is too strong. God’s soldiers find Me too easily. It must be lesser angels. Bring down His new creations and you will be rewarded.”

The Fallen fought among themselves for the opportunity to prove themselves to Satan. One did not; this one hid among the other nameless, slinking back into the shadows. They’d been burned – literally – by their unthinking loyalty before. Never again. They’d wait to see how this played out.

* * *

A day later, Duke Hastur sprawled in front of Satan’s throne, the lower classes of Fallen ranged around the edges of the vast hall, nameless and shapeless, a swirling miasma of torn and tortured auras. “You failed,” Satan said to Hastur. Satan still retained His Heavenly beauty, but there was a terrifying threat in His voice.

The Fallen angel hoped Hastur would survive this setback. Hastur was terrible, but at least Hastur claimed them. Bad enough to be condemned to Hell; worse to be a low-ranked ex-angel without even the dubious protection of a Duke, prey to other Dukes’ and Princes’ legions. Satan had already eaten other Dukes, however; Hastur would not be the first, if it came to that.

“I was so close, my lord,” Duke Hastur croaked, bowing impossibly low. He’d squeezed his ex-celestial being into an Earthly creature, a moist, ugly thing with misproportioned limbs, a warty back, and slitted eyes.

“Close? CLOSE?” roared Satan. “Close is _useless_. You _failed_.”

“Yes, my lord,” Duke Hastur said, groveling. “I failed, my lord, but I worked out how to get closer.” There was a flare of heat from Satan’s throne. _Find a different word,_ the nameless former angel thought, desperately. They began to slink backward, preparing to go to ground if their Duke should be consumed.

Hastur was still talking. “You were right, of course, my lord, it has to be a lesser demon. I was too powerful; they found me. I could not succeed. But, my lord, I brought back useful information.”

“Tell me.”

Hastur’s ridiculous warty corporation leapt forward with an explosive extension of its hind legs. There was a wave of pain in the motion. The corporation was too small for Hastur, but he made it work. “This. Inhabiting one of God’s golems. It was an effective hiding place, for a while. If a demon of less power were to do it, they would be hard to spot.”

Satan’s aura darkened. “I do not like to pin my chances on a weak angel.”

“Nor do I, my lord. But if there were many making the attempt, one might succeed, by chance. No one of them can compare to you or even me, my lord. But if enough of them tried –”

Satan sniffed. The fires did not flare, but they burned more intensely. “It is disgusting. But I will permit it. Go and make your horde take over the creatures of Eden.”

Hastur leaned infinitesimally down, touching his horrible mud-colored snout to the ground. Then he turned around awkwardly and hopped out of the hall, his horde meekly following him.

Satan beckoned to Prince Beelzebub and motioned for zzzzir to follow the toad. The nameless one kept as far out of sight as they could.

* * *

Hastur marshaled his legion and led them toward Eden. Packs of Hellhounds swirled around the path to Earth but didn’t dare attack the demons in their numbers. Hastur hid in the darkness below the night side of Earth, waiting for Eden to sweep around above them, and attempted to teach his soldiers how to take on Earthly bodies, the ones that could be reached from below, the ones that crept and burrowed and crawled in the ground or swam in the water, within easy reach from Below.

Hastur’s “teaching” consisted mostly of yelling at them about their incompetence. The yelling escalated into shrieking as his demons failed to squeeze their auras into the tight spaces of Earthly corporations. Privately, the Fallen angel wondered if perhaps the reason that Hastur had succeeded in squeezing into the gross body was that his aura was already several sizes too small. As much as his existence depended on it, Hastur couldn’t make himself give the advantage of knowledge to his lesser demons. Other Dukes and Princes came to watch, and gossiped and smirked over Hastur’s failure to perform. Some disappeared to attempt the possession themselves.

The nameless demon lurked, watching, and their circumspection paid off. They saw other unfortunate ex-angels fail. They saw _how_ they failed. Hastur consumed the ones who angered him the most. That was motivating. The Fallen angel considered what both Satan and Hastur had said about lesser creatures being harder for celestial beings to spot. They ranged their senses around Eden, looking for a creature big enough to inhabit but low enough to overlook, crawling on the ground but able to move around above it.

They found one. He – for almost all Earthly corporations were gendered, and this one was “he,” for now – was much prettier than Hastur’s corporation, too.

* * *

In his new corporation, he was even lower than Hastur. Beelzebub towered above them both, disdainful. Hastur, for his part, was both furious and envious. The Fallen angel decided a bit of groveling wouldn’t hurt. He dipped his snout to the ground and wound around himself, always seeming to move lower and lower.

Duke Hastur named him Crawly. Prince Beelzebub ordered him to go up to Eden and make some trouble.


	2. Made Some Trouble

Crawly was alone. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself.

He was still a little shocked at how effective a few words whispered into Eve’s ear had been. Once she got the idea into her head, it had all happened so fast. There had been a night of human fear and recrimination, and then morning had come, and the humans were banished from the garden, had squeezed their bodies through a hole in the wall, and left.

Crawly was left in the Garden with no other sentient creatures around. Just him in the snaky body he’d borrowed. He twisted himself into knots on the ground, rubbing through the grass, luxuriating in its soft feel, such a respite from the horrors of Hell.

And then—pain, like a needle through his head, pinning him to the ground, a shaft of ice-cold white light immobilizing the rest of him. There was Grace but it was terrible, implacable, righteous.

**CRAWLY, WHAT DID YOU DO?**

The voice—Their voice—reverberated in his head, amplifying the pain of his immobilization.

“Lord,” he said, his coils shuddering. “I—had ordersss—didn’t exssspect—”

**WHERE DID YOU GET THAT BODY?**

Crawly felt fear and pain, but also annoyance. They were omniscient; what was the point of this questioning after things They already knew? “Just borrowing it, wasn’t going to _keep_ it,” he said. Then, shocked at his own insolence, he added: “My lord.”

**IT IS YOURS FOREVER. DO NOT THINK YOU ARE BETTER THAN THE ANIMALS. YOU WILL CRAWL ON YOUR BELLY AND YOU WILL EAT DUST ALL THE DAYS OF YOUR LIFE.**

The divine shaft of light vanished. God’s grace had burned him, but its lack was somehow worse. Crawly heaved vertical, his snaky head bobbing and weaving as he held it as far aloft as he could: “Come back! Lord! Talk to me!”

They did not come back.

He fell to the ground, groveled, and begged Them, but They did not come back.

He thrashed on the ground, coils writhing as he shouted in incoherent anger and loss. No one replied.

His mind fixed on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. There was grace in that fruit. It may have been the means of Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden, but Crawly had felt the rich wave of sentience and sensation rolling off the two humans at their first bites. The unperturbed, shallow pools of their minds had stirred with intense emotions and desires and creative power. (There had been other emotions, too, more negative ones of fear and shame and pain, but as Crawly already knew those emotions well, they hadn’t stood out as strong.)

He slithered up into the Tree and out onto a branch. He found a fruit by scent more than sight, his forked tongue picking up its intoxicating fragrance. He opened his mouth and bit.

The globular fruit slid away from his mouth. He tried again, but his mouth was too small; his fangs could find no purchase.

He coiled around the fruit, trying to hold it still while he punctured it with his fangs. But he could not open wide enough; the fruit’s skin remained unbroken, its fragrance taunting him.

Crawly’s anger focused on the fruit. He coiled around it, cursing God’s cruelty. To hang a temptation in a place so obvious that the humans could not but succumb – but to leave it out of reach from one already Fallen – it cut, so many ways. He wound his coils around the apple, constricted it, but it was impervious, and then

he

was

falling

and he landed with a bump on the ground, the apple still held within his coils. It had not been a long fall, as Earthly falls went, but his mind whited out with fear.

He lost a little time.

When he knew himself again, he pleaded with God a while, but They still didn’t answer.

He gazed at the apple. It had been so easy for Eve. She’d just reached, and picked it, and eaten.

Her body was not so different from the snake’s. Every one of her cells had worked the same way as the snake’s. Muscles, nerves, eyes, lungs, bones. The snake whose body Crowley now inhabited and the human whom God had favored with speech and choices were fundamentally similar. The snake’s cells even possessed the information necessary to grow and control limbs. It was all there. God had made one blueprint for Earthly life, and just tweaked it to make all its plants and animals and fungi.

God wasn’t talking to Crawly, but They had left the blueprints where Crawly could read them.

Crawly grabbed the cells of the serpent he inhabited with occult tentacles and forced them to follow those blueprints. His body rippled and changed. He felt bones breaking, fusing, extending, and oh, it hurt, but what was this pain compared to his Fall? He willed his body human-shaped.

He reached for the apple with a new limb. He was clumsy. Instead of grabbing it with a hand, he whacked it and it rolled away, out of reach. He cried out and tried to grab it, but he had no memory of limbs, and the arm would not obey him.

Things went like that for most of the day. Crawly would rather forget all of it happened. We’ll allow him the privacy.

But we have to come back to see how it ended.

He’d gotten control of his now human-shaped corporation. He’d reached for an apple. He’d closed a long-fingered hand around it. He’d picked it.

It fit comfortably into his hand, pleasingly heavy, hard, crisp, shiny. Crawly brought it to his nose, opening his mouth to help him smell it; intoxicating, floral. He took a bite. It made a satisfying crunch.

In his mouth, the bite of apple turned to pasty, gritty mush.

He fell out of the tree – again – and spat it out. He could sense its enticing smell with his serpent tongue, but on his tongue, it turned to dust.

He reached for more apples, and bit, but they were all the same. Intoxicatingly fragrant; ash in his mouth.

He felt poised on a knife’s edge. He could despair; that was one option. But the cruelty of the apple’s flavor was freeing, in a way. There was no more to be gained in trying to bargain with God. He’d have to make his way in Hell.

He couldn’t return to Hell until he’d brokered a truce between his newly permanent serpentine form and his human-shaped body. He crawled forward to the trunk of the Tree of Knowledge, and, leaning against it, rose unsteadily to his feet.

He staggered through Eden, following a smooth path that had been trod until this morning by Adam and Eve’s feet. He let himself gloat, a little, that his human-shaped feet were on it now, and God’s chosen creatures’ were not.

Walking on long limbs got easier with practice. He found a rhythm of falling from one leg to the other, gravity sucking him downward and each footfall catching himself and shoving him upward again. It felt defiant. (He had no idea what he looked like. “Defiant” was not a word most would use. “Drunk” was more apt.)

Eventually, he came to a wall. He sneered at the wall. What were walls to him? He could sink into the Earth and travel beyond it.

But he didn’t need to. His natural form could climb anything. He shifted serpentine and slithered to the top of the wall.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from [_Paradise Lost_ book 9](https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_9/text.shtml). In _Paradise Lost_ Satan really does try to sneak into Eden and is detected and thrown out by some of Gabriel's legion. He returns as a frog and whispers into Eve's ear while she dreams, but Gabriel's soldiers find him out; clearly, that was Hastur, not Satan. He returns a third time as the Serpent, but, well, we all know the Serpent wasn't actually Satan.


End file.
